Rudy Giuliani Still Egregiously Wrong On Crime

Same as it ever was. A few days ago, I noticed that the former mayor had written an epitaph-cum-agitprop for James Wilson's broken windows theory. I thought about saying something, but (no offense to the Manhattan Institute) didn't think his piece would make a splash. Now that, via Capital New York, I see the Post has refurbished the same op-ed, just as the stop-and-frisk issue heats up in the imminent mayoral race, I will.

Under Giuliani, Broken Windows started out as a good faith effort to reduce serious crime by going after petty crime. But over time it evolved into a branding mechanism, a means for relentlessly associating New York City's renaissance with Mayor Giuliani's face. Today, Broken Windows is among the most universally discredited theories in the social sciences. Study after study has concluded there is no causal link between the reduction in nuisance crimes, like turnstile jumping or aggressive panhandling, and the reduction in serious crimes, like robbery and murder. And this was easily inferable at the time. The reduction in New York City's crime rate was echoed nationally, in many cities that did not employ Quality of Life policing. In retrospect, the principal causes behind New York City's crime drop had nothing to do with Giuliani. They included: a receding of the '80s crack epidemic, a growth in the prison population thanks to the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, an increase in the numbers of police initiated by Giuliani's predecessor, and possibly, as the Freakonomics authors famously argued, the legalization of abortion a generation earlier. But, as the journalist Wayne Barrett says in Giuliani Time, "this mythology that Rudy Giuliani single-handedly supercopped, and conquered, crime in New York City" is now in the "bloodstream" of Americans.

If you prefer hard numbers, dig through this thorough research, from the same year, that dissected the impact of the crime policy under Giuliani himself. It found no evidence that broken windows policing deterred crime or used city resources wisely. Here's what John Roman, a crime analyst with the Urban Institute, told me when I reported on policing in the fall:

"I can find very little support for the idea that our policies have really affected the crime rates."

Despite the heady evidence, the Giuliani mythology lives on. Detroitannounced it would take Wilson's theory to its streets in February.

New York's stop-and-frisk strategy has run rampant with one part of broken windows: targeting the minutiae of urban life to prevent crime. Yesterday, Mayor Emanuel unveiled his crime-fighting plan for Chicago that, at the onset, has two prongs. One is the other half of broken windows---the Quality of Life stuff (clearing vacant lots, cutting weeds and the like). And the other portion commits to building a "social network" for police of "community, faith-based and government resources."

At this point, it's uncertain how many resources Chicago will put into each strategy. But the latter one at least has more evidence behind it. And, if executed well, it moves in the exact opposite direction of stop-and-frisk and the Giuliani legacy.